We can see this is our whole development. The chief, or one of the most striking examples is our application of the law of value to the Russian economy. Today these God-damned scoundrels all turn up and say "of course"! But you could look through the literature of the Fourth International for pages and pages. I do not remember any statements to that effect, (p. 13) … He reminded them that Hegel had distinguished between vulgar empiricism, understanding, and Reason (dialectical thought), charging each with a certain value, a certain threshold of thought. The Dialectic was the ultimate realization of the Mind, of the Subject. Clearly, he suggested, Lenin had been capable of dialectical thought, capable of transcending through his thought the old categories (Second International) that he had inherited: "The Russian revolution of February caused violent changes in Lenin's categories. World War I set him revising the categories of the Second International" (p. 17). On the other hand, however, Trotsky had been limited to Understanding, a necessary and useful stage of thought but one that could end in its reduction to absolute categories: "He would have been able to lecture you on changing categories most profoundly. He talked about it all the time. But fixed and finite determinations held him by the throat to the end" (p. 18). Trotsky had been unwilling to recognize the true significance of Stalinism: "stalinism as a necessary, an inevitable, form of development of the labour movement. The workers are not mistaken. They are not deceived. Not in any serious sense of these words. They are making an experience that is necessary to their own development" (p. 30).

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 1335